Adina Levin's weblog. For conversation about books I've been reading, social software, and other stuff too.

Blogging in Tongues

Just read a lovely review of October Sky by Victor Ruiz, in Spanish, with the help of a bookmarklet phrase translator.
The brouhaha about Ublog’s acqusition by 6Apart and some conversations with Spanish bloggers on Joiito was inducement to read blogs in Spanish and French. But I don’t have enough vocabulary to read fluently. Picking up a dictionary — or even opening another browser window to google-translate — is sufficiently slow enough that I just won’t incorporate non-english blogs into daily browsing.
I really wanted a one-click method of translating an unfamiliar word. So I modified a couple of these translation bookmarklets to accept phrases instead of whole pages.
Words that give meaning and context to the story — cohete = rocket, huelgas = strikes — are suddenly a click away.